New Substantive Revision to the SEP Entry on the Epistemology of Modality

 Here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yablo's "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?": Classic Papers in Modal Epistemology Series

The publication of Yablo's 1993 PPR paper, "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?" is widely considered a watershed in the history of the epistemology of modality. It's perhaps the most widely cited paper in the subfield to date. And while the subfield has progressed considerably since its publication, it still repays revisiting. And given the blog's aims, I've typed up a fairly careful outline of Yablo's paper. There are still some gaps, so I'll come back in due course to fill them in. 1. Introduction 1.1. Some statements express true propositions about what is metaphysically possible; others do not. 1.2. How can we tell the difference between the two? 1.3. The standard philosophical answer is captured by Hume’s maxim regarding conceivability-possibility inferences:  1.4. Hume’s (modal epistemology) Maxim: “‘Tis an establish'd maxim in metaphysics, that whatever the mind clearly conceives, includes the idea of possible existence, or...
Read more

Descartes' Modal Epistemology

Rough draft. In progress. In what follows, I will explicate what I call ‘the Cartesian Package’.  The Cartesian Package provides the basis for Descartes’ unique account of modal epistemology.  It has two main components: an account of the nature of objects and an account of forming adequate conceptions of them.   Take the former component first.  Given Descartes’ account of homogeneous objects, every object has a structure of properties that are related to one another in a way that’s crucial for his modal epistemology, as we will see.  First, they have a principal attribute, which is the most general and fundamental feature of an object.  This feature is a determinable, and it specifies the kind of object that a thing is, and all of the other sorts of properties that the thing can have.  Descartes, of course, took extension to be the principal attribute of material objects.   Second, objects have other attributes that flow necessarily and transpar...
Read more

Two Notions of Necessity and the Modal Ontological Arguments that Conflate Them

There are two notions of necessity floating around that easily get conflated: (i) exists in all possible worlds, and (ii) can't not exist. But (ii) can't be captured by (i); (ii) is more fine-grained than (i).  Indeed, it's epistemically possible that a being is necessary in sense (i), but not in sense (ii).  To see this, say that a world stub is some initial temporal segment of a possible world (whether beginningless or not). Now consider that it it's epistemically possible for a god (an uncreated, metaphysically independent being) G to exist in the world stub of every possible world, and yet go out of existence at some time downstream of the world stub of at least one -- but perhaps many, and perhaps even every -- possible world (say it commits suicide due to eternal boredom, or it's annihilated by some other being downstream of one or more world stubs). It's therefore epistemically possible for G to be necessary in sense (i), but not in sense (ii). This has ...
Read more